Fight Club and the Masculinity Crisis

In this past week, I watched Fight Club, a 1999 film directed by David Fincher. While it was an engaging watch (that I would definitely recommend checking out), the themes of the movie reminded me a lot of our discussions about masculinity in this class.

I won't delve into the entire plot to avoid major spoilers, but the essential premise is this: the movie follows an unnamed (often referred to as "the narrator") white collar, Kafka-esque, tired office worker, with no purpose or direction to his life, and living with crippling insomnia. His materialistic, consumerism lifestyle is extremely monotonous, until he meets an interesting man named Tyler Durden on a business trip flight. After the narrator's apartment blows up from unknown causes, he goes to live with Tyler, who pushes him to "hit rock bottom," and to let go of the materialistic life, saying to him, "Once you let go of everything, you can do anything." The two of them start a fight club, which quickly gains underground popularity among other dissatisfied white collar workers, all of them feeling as though they live an emasculated, purposeless life. In this club, the number one rule is "You don't talk about fight club." However, as the movie continues, it grows more widespread and cultish, especially when Tyler begins giving assignments to the members now living with them- first to start a fight with a stranger, then to vandalize public property, and eventually, to bomb several financial buildings as the culmination of "Project Mayhem." The narrator discovers this plan and realizes that he must stop the Fight Club before it is too late.

So, I am leaving out a couple of plot points and characters here, partly to avoid major spoilers, and partly because I would be here all day trying to explain the entirety of the movie, but the main area of the film I want to focus on is the creation of the Fight Club and its members. The reason it exists is as a way for emasculated men stuck in monotonous jobs to regain control over their masculinity, in an age where masculinity is not as overtly understood or needed. As Tyler Durden says at one of the Fight Club meetings, "We have no Great War. We have no Great Depression. Our Great War is a Spiritual War, our Great Depression is our lives." The movie establishes this need for disempowered men in a capitalist system to make something of themselves, which manifests itself in acts of violence. This movie also reminded me of a quote we discussed from one of our readings, which was that "Masculinity is not something you talk about, it's something you do." Fight Club's number one rule being "we don't talk about Fight Club" reflects that idea clearly, as instead of talking about their frustrations and feelings of inferiority, its members fight each other to express themselves, which later escalates to acts of terrorism. It's also interesting to observe some of the fanbase around this film. On the Fight Club hashtag on Tik-Tok, some of the top posts are young men doing the trend of "me before Fight Club-" and it's them appearing relatively normal- and "me after [..]," which shows them with a shaved head, possibly buff, glaring into the camera. I suppose their videos are implying that they have now been indoctrinated into Fight Club and are involved in its "assignments," or more realistically, they are adopting the Fight Club mindset. However, by creating this videos, they seem to be proving the exact point the movie is trying to make: the lengths people will go to- specifically emasculated men- to exert control over themselves and their masculinity can be dangerous, especially if they don't talk about it.